Computer Science > Machine Learning

Abstract: In dynamic environments, learned controllers are supposed to take motion into
account when selecting the action to be taken. However, in existing
reinforcement learning works motion is rarely treated explicitly; it is rather
assumed that the controller learns the necessary motion representation from
temporal stacks of frames implicitly. In this paper, we show that for
continuous control tasks learning an explicit representation of motion improves
the quality of the learned controller in dynamic scenarios. We demonstrate this
on common benchmark tasks (Walker, Swimmer, Hopper), on target reaching and
ball catching tasks with simulated robotic arms, and on a dynamic single ball
juggling task. Moreover, we find that when equipped with an appropriate network
architecture, the agent can, on some tasks, learn motion features also with
pure reinforcement learning, without additional supervision. Further we find
that using an image difference between the current and the previous frame as an
additional input leads to better results than a temporal stack of frames.